> This history is in really marked contrast to MATLAB and its corresponding free version Octave, where computer scientists pretty much refuse to use Octave, despite MATLAB's massive price tag to pretty much everyone involved (even with 90% discounts).
Do you have any insights as to why Octave does not have higher adoption?
I've always been a bit sad about it, but everyone involved is probably a rational actor.
Computer science professors probably view a couple hundred dollars per MATLAB network license as a tiny expense on a $1m+ grant (whereas statistics grants are apparently often smaller), and they may be charged for it in departmental overhead anyway (removing the incentive to cut costs).
The type of people who could contribute either core code or toolbox type code to Octave often have an extremely rare quantitative skill set that is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, so there is a huge incentive to get paid to do similar work instead. There probably isn't much community recognition (to balance things out) for implementing a library in Octave. (Though, in the R world there are certain recognizable superstars like Hadley Wickham.)
Graduate students (who might work for cheap on these problems) are probably more focused on publications and networking.
As long as all of this is the case, Octave will always kind of just be a worse MATLAB that happens to be open source, so a new user choosing between them will probably just choose MATLAB by default.
It is true that we have a lot of trouble attracting new contributors. Most of our users keep demanding features that seem to us unimportant but to them are all the world: a GUI ("whatever for?", we think. "Use a real text editor!"), a JIT compiler ("here's a nickle, get better vectorised code, kid"), perfect Matlab compatibility (a never-ending chase, not very fun, in which we must always be behind).
Of these, we're finally slowly listening to our users. Two of our current three GSoC students are working on a GUI and a JIT compiler respectively. I have wild hope that this will attract more users and developers. I'm also currently hosting an Octave conference in a few days towards this goal:
By the way, Octave is GNU (so is R, supposedly), so we're not really open source; we're free. ;-)
I don't know why Octave hasn't been able to replicate R's success. I don't know if R's not really being GNU despite in name has something to it (R developers routinely try to find new ways to get around the GPL and link R to non-free code, and I don't doubt that this linking to Oracle's database is another example of that). I don't know if it's just that a lot of people with big money care more about statistics and R than they care about Octave (banks and brokers for R, electrical and civil engineers for Otave). Maybe our code sucks more than R's.
Do you have any suggestion how to make Octave the standard instead of Matlab? The recent gratis classes that emerged from Stanford gave Octave a lot of publicity. Do you have any suggestion of what else we might do?
You're probably in a much better position to evaluate than I am! My guess is that more Octave-based classes would translate into more users and more code written for Octave down the line, but I'm not sure how to encourage more use of Octave in the classroom in the first place.
Matlab is truly the RAD tool of choice for numerical programming and has a solid grip in universities combined with enterprise-level support.
I do not think Octave ever tried to replicate its workflow (which is not general programmer centric at all) and domain-specific documentation but merely focused on the underlying language compatibility, which is really the least important part of Matlab.
On top of that, I seem to recall, Matlab was one of the first of the specialist programming toolsets to offer a very competitive "Student Edition". This was a godsend for schools and universities before the Internet took off.
In short, Octave was too little too late, and Numpy/Scipy, while catching up fast, has supporting tools spread all over the place as well as being geared more to general programmers who want access to convenient numerics rather than numerical modellers/engineers wanting a RAD tool.
Numpy/Scipy etc. may well overtake Matlab eventually, but that will be purely a function of its infrastructure, not the something as mundane as even the nice language (which admittedly was its initial driving force). At least in this respect, it has done a lot better than Octave in much less time.
Actually, there are tons of people who want to run Matlab code freely. The code is already written. They need to run it in clusters, or they need to run it at home.
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I tend to go back and forth between vim and RubyMine. I like editing in vim, but when I want/need to use a debugger, I use RubyMine. RubyMine has a vim keymap (I believe they also have emacs), so editing within it is not so bad either.
I think I've adopted this since I went from an IDE -> vim instead of the opposite. Having a visual debugger was one of the features that kept me in an IDE (at least for Ruby). I just never felt like I was as productive without it.
The article states that these 'moons' typically stay for around 10 months. Do they escape from the Earth's gravity or are they pulled closer to the Earth and eventually break up in the atmosphere?
2006 RH120 is a tiny near-Earth asteroid with a diameter of about five metres, which ordinarily orbits the Sun but makes close approaches to the Earth–Moon system every twenty years or so. Occasionally the object temporarily enters Earth orbit through temporary satellite capture (TSC).
On the Eclipse side, I've been using viPlugin[1]. It is not free, but I've felt like it has been worth the cost since my forays into vim had all failed before getting this plugin. If you're working heavily with Eclipse/VS, it is definitely jarring to switch back and forth between one of those and vim, but using a plugin like this eases that pain.
I'd recommend that if you need a nap midday, then nap midday.
I generally wake up around the same time in the morning, regardless of what time I went to bed. This can sometimes lead to me feeling very sleepy midday, which kills my productivity. Coffee can sometimes help, but sometimes it just makes my head even more cloudy. If I'm in a position to do so (if I'm in a location where I can lie down and I don't have a meeting soon), I generally take a short nap (~45 minutes). This brings my productivity back to normal in most cases.
I personally don't do well with midday naps. Takes a chunk out of my day and it takes me hours to really feel awake again...then night time comes around and I'm not tired. Using the weekends to get back on a good sleep schedule is usually my go-to move.
We use it for year-end reviews. It is pretty telling that every year before the reviews start, our HR department apologizes for still using SuccessFactors.
We have also tried to do more year-round tracking on the progress of business objectives, but that hasn't caught on either.
Agreed. I have tried to express this to others after my father started to really change. Most people were shocked and assured me that I wouldn't think that way if I actually had the disease. My only response to that was to say that I hope this is cured by that point.
Could you recommend some good resources for learning more about collaborative filtering? I'd love to help hack, but feel like I should learn more first.
Most of what I learned was from Programming Collective Intelligence (http://amzn.com/0596529325). If you're in the Bay Area, Noisebridge has a self-taught machine learning class that I went to for a while (great group, I just couldn't make the time commitment).
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do?code=CFSTNY